Back in the early 90’s I picked up a ’77 Ford LTD for a couple of hundred bucks. It was fuckin’ red of all colors and it had smacked something so the left front of the nose was pushed in a bit.
I didn’t care.
The thing was an aircraft carrier and had a 460 engine in it that ran like a top.
My cousin called it The Couch because he said the back seat was bigger and more comfortable than the couch in his living room.
It was a true road car. One finger on the steering wheel at 90, all day long.
After I had owned it a while I started hearing a kind of whistling noise out of the exhaust but it seemed to still run good so I ignored it.
One day I get in the thing to go some where, fire it up and hear a clankity clank and a couple seconds later it didn’t hardly want to stay running, like it was loading up.
Being me, I stomped the gas pedal wide open to clear it out.
It huffed and coughed, plainly struggling to breathe.
All at once I hear this clankity clank sound again and the thing just took off like a raped ape with a huge black cloud of shit belching out the back.
Cool, must have had indigestion or something.
I backed out of the driveway and saw something that looked like a black and gray egg sitting right at the end of it.
I’m not kidding, an egg.
I stopped and got out, went and picked it up and bigger than shit, the thing was perfectly egg shaped, except it was made out of this stuff,
A hunk of the catalytic converter had broken off and got formed to the diameter of the exhaust pipe as it worked it’s way out.
And to do your part against Global Warming, you replaced the catalytic converter, right?
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Oh you know I did, right?
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Not a doubt in my mind.
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Lol.
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Glasspacks…
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I had a car back around ’82 or ’83 that suddenly ran like crap. That was when leaded gas was still around and someone must have filled an underground tank wrong. Killed the cat.
Never heard of a car throwing up the cat, though.
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Years ago, my then wife had a Mercedes 230E, and the converter guts came apart and plugged the resonator. The resonator cost more than the converter, so I had the shop replace the converter and run straight pipe from it to the muffler.
The car didn’t sound quite the same after that, but I didn’t care — it was her POS Mercedes.
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And your car ran a helluva a lot better I bet, no restriction and the Cat body was intact in case ya ever got checked… total thumbs up!
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I imagine it was the automotive equivalent of a kidney stone, knowwhutImean?
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I had a 76 chevy truck blow the plug out of the bottom of the cat and thousands of little ceramic bb’s blew out all over the road. truck ran better though!
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That’s my 76 up above . I hit post too soon!
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ok this is too complicated for an old man.
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Back when I was a kid, say mid to late 80’s into the early 90’s; a time when you could buy used vehicles for a couple hundred of bucks. One of the first things I would do is run a piece of bar stock/rebar through the catalytic converter and blow out all of the pieces. Worked wonders every single time.
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